As U.S. Debt Hits a Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices

tardedmeme

100% debt-to-GDP sounds like some fundamental threshold when it's actually just a Schelling point. It's 1.00 GDP-years of debt, which is a number with an arbitrary time unit in it (why not GDP-month or GDP-decade?)

expedition32

Remember the Tea Party? But yes you don't hear anyone about this because politicians waste no time on things they know they can't fix. DOGE was a fucking embarrassment. In the 1930s the Dutch cabinet knew very well that they likely couldn't keep up neutrality. But they also knew there was no chance in hell that they could build up an army in 3 years that could stop Hitler. So what did they do? Lie to the public and secretly open Canadian bank accounts.

scuff3d

We don't hear anything about it because the Republicans are in charge. If a Democrat was in the White House right now you wouldn't be able to shut Fox News and it's ilk up about how the national debt is a harbinger of doom for the entire country.

SilverElfin

It’s not just US debt that’s a problem. It’s also state level and local level. Every part of our government is spending irresponsibly. A lot of the debt is hidden too. A pension with more future liabilities than it can pay for isn’t going to show up as deficit on this year’s budget. A state putting out bonds may count interest payments in the budget numbers that show up in press conferences, but the actual total debt isn’t talked about much. I’m not sure why anyone expects differently. Politicians corruptly waste money to helping themselves, their careers, their party, and their causes. It’s other people’s money that they are spending. And most of them never had substantial experience in private industry to learn the skills it takes to manage billions of dollars of budget. Governments are far, far more wasteful and inefficient than anyone realizes.

ericpauley

The GDP-relative amount of US debt held by foreign investors has actually gone down on since 2014: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HBFIGDQ188S

sharts

Why does US debt even matter? Why does GDP even matter? Just print some cash and cancel the debt if the borrowers and creditors are two pockets on the same pants. All these abstractions don’t measure what matters anyway.

incrediblylarge

US cannot default on US debt. It is not possible. World reserve=US does not work the same way. Most politicians know that the debt does not matter, but will use it as a rhetorical device. Does the treasury yield rate matter to the US gov, like the people at the top making the decisions, in any critical sense? I kind of feel like they can control it through policy or the fed, since $USD is literally what the world runs on. So even tho treasury repayments on huge debt amounts now comprise a considerable slice of the budget, and the story is that US cannot afford to support its citizenry, cos they are in debt, I suspect that they could exert far more influence over this if they chose to.